Murdoch Media Blames Marijuana for Mass Shootings

Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy.

— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) December 15, 2012

In 2012 after the Sandy Hook school shooting, media mogul Rupert Murdoch tweeted, "When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons?" But now, ten years later, Murdoch's media outlets are busy pointing fingers of blame for the Uvalde, TX school shooting not on the AR-15-style guns the killer purchased legally days after he turned 18, but on marijuana. 

The trial balloon was a letter to the editor that was published in the Wall Street Journal on May 31:

Your editorial fails to mention one important factor: cannabis use. Cannabis, psychosis and violence are intimately related. With the legalization of cannabis, you can expect violent incidents to increase, regardless of the weapon of choice.

Gabe Syme, Phoenix

No Gabe Syme + Phoenix shows up in a Google search. Gabriel Syme is the name of the anarchist hero of the 1908 G.K. Chesterton novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. The 2000 video game Deus Ex features several excerpts from the book. A Twitter account from "Hitler, North Dakota" @gabrielsyme08 has weird (mock?) White Supremacy posts and another with a bodybuilder and the line, "Time for another 200 mg of caffeine."

The same day as Syme's letter appeared in the WSJ, Laura Ingraham, who broadcasts on Fox News, asked on her show, "Why are people not talking about the pot psychosis / violent behavior connection?" Ingraham drew from a book by disgraced anti-vaxxer Alex Berenson to draw a connection between marijuana, mental illness and violence. She repeated a claim by Berenson that the New York Times had removed a reference to Uvalde shooter Salvadore Ramos being angry at his mother and grandmother for not letting him smoke weed. (The claim, supported by screenshots, seems to be true; the story had 13 different contributors and probably got updated as breaking news; I have not seen a response from NYT.)

The following day, Whoopi Goldberg called out conservatives' latest lame attempt to claim something other than assault weapons are to blame on The View. "It's not that people are smoking too much weed. You know that, Laura," Goldberg said. "People who smoke weed are not carrying AR-15s. They don't even know where they put them."

Ingraham responded to Goldberg, doubling down on her claims in an interview with Dr. Eric Voth, a Kansas internist with no particular expertise in drugs who anti-marijuana advocates trot out when needed to advance their absurd theories.

Ingraham, a former Reagan speechwriter who clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is no champion of values or human rights. In 1984 while in college as editor of The Dartmouth Review, she sent an undercover reporter to a meeting of the Gay Students Association and published a transcript of the meeting, including the names of the participants, describing them as "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites."  In 1997, she tried to recant her views in an essay in the Washington Post after her gay brother Curtis and his partner were diagnosed with AIDS. Curtis has called his sister "a monster" and says she was influenced by their father, who he described as a Nazi sympathizer and abusive alcoholic. [Source.]

In April 2022, one of Ingraham's tweets meant to criticize student loan forgiveness backfired, since it revealed that she'd allowed her mother, at the age of 73 and still working as a waitress, to continue paying Ingraham's college loans while she was working at a New York law firm. But that hasn't stopped her from lecturing us on morals. 

The Australian-born Murdoch, whose net worth of $21.7 billion makes him the 31st richest person in the US and 71st in the world, owns hundreds of local, national and international publishing outlets, including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, book publisher Harper Collins, and Fox News. According to The New York Times, Ronald Reagan's campaign team credited Murdoch and the Post for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election. Reagan later "waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market," allowing Murdoch to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television. Reagan then erased the Fairness Doctrine, which required opposing views to be aired on TV stations. The Trump justice department "came to Murdoch's rescue" by appealing a federal court ruling blocking the merger of AT&T and Warner, a deal that made billions for the Murdoch family. 

Even Reagan was against putting assault weapons in the hands of civilians. Trump flip flopped on the issue and signed a law erasing criminal background checks for the mentally ill. Meanwhile,  Daniel Defense, the company that made the gun used by Ramos, has been handed over 100 federal weapons contracts by the Pentagon. 

 

While marijuana use, among many other things, can be a trigger for the small percentage of the population disposed to schizophrenia, for most it's more of a mellowing agent. George Carlin, the subject of a new HBO Documentary, said of growing up in New York City on his album Occupation: Foole, "I was 14 when grass swept the neighborhood. We hadn't been into grass before. We were into gang fighting and wine and beer in the park… Then pot came along and gang fighting went away. Guys went from making zip guns to hash pipes." 

 

Actor Matthew McConaughey, who was born and raised in Uvalde, has also called for a ban on assault weapons for civilians (but only called for raising the age to purchase them from 18 to 21, and other measures like waiting periods and red-flag laws, at his surprise White House press conference today). McCounaghey, who became known for his role in the stoner flick Dazed and Confused, was arrested for marijuana possession in 1999 after Austin police found him playing the bongos, with a bong at his side. In the nude.

Jimmy Kimmel, who did a somber, emotional rant after the Uvalde shooting, played a clip of Ingraham saying that marijuana can trigger psychosis in teens, adding: "OK, well then let's make sure that those teens don't have AR-15's in their homes," to much applause. Calling out those who would create a nonsensical "cloud of uncertainty" by reaching to pot as an excuse for not taking action, Kimmel asked, "Who can forget the Willie Nelson killing spree of 1985?" 

 

THE CAMPAIGN / COVER STORY CONTINUES.... 

Doors. Video games. Marijuana. The presence of "evil."

And now... phones.

The Republican Party will literally blame anything and everything except the common denominator in every mass shooting: GUNS. https://t.co/tadHoO5Zi5

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 9, 2022

According to a Daily Mail story, Ramos had been "a relatively normal child until the eighth grade,"until he was bullied for a stutter and lisp, with classmates also allegedly using gay slurs against him. "He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people," his friend Stephen Garcia told the Washington Post, "Over social media, over gaming, over everything." When Garcia had to move away, Ramos began to change, dressing in all black and donning large military boots. He told another friend he wanted to join the Marines so that he could kill people, and was a fan of the shooting and combat video game Call of Duty. But bullying and videogames that train kids to be killers aren't in the sights of conservatives who would rather blame pot. 

The Wall Street Journal has now published an oped, "Cannabis and the Violent Crime Surge" by one of its editors, Allysia Finley, connecting just a few of the many mass murders to shooters who used marijuana. Many more, like the Columbine shooter, were on prescription medications. 

Scraping even further down to the bottom of the barrel, Julie Banderas (apparently the token brunette on Fox) interviewed former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, who claimed that Ramos was a "heavy marijuana user" which "causes psychosis." Bennett, a heavy tobacco smoker and gambler, was our nation's first drug "czar" until he resigned claiming the drug war was over after Alaska voted to re-criminalize marijuana, while kids were still shooting each other over meth in the streets of DC outside his office.   

All of this is great cover for the accusations against Fox host Fucker Carlson, whose Replacement Theory rhetoric was spouted by the 18-year-old who shot up a Buffalo grocery store in a black neighborhood 10 days before the Uvalde shooting. And it's a deft deflection from the coming Congressional hearings on the January 6, 2021 insurrection, which Faux News has announced it will not air. Meanwhile, the country has been distracted with the hideous trial of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp while the antics of another couple, that of Ginni Thomas supporting the insurrection and her husband Clarence voting against investigating it, has barely made the news.

UPDATE 6/13/22: The Washington Examiner, owned by Phillip Anschutz, ranked the 66th richest person in the US with an estimated net worth of $10.1 billion, has chimed in with its own editorial.  

Anschutz’s media outlets drummed the anti-doobie drum in Colorado, and the Anschutz Entertainment Group banned cannabis use at California's Coachella festival. He has donated tens of thousands to anti-marijuana groups SAM and Smart Colorado. (Source.) He's also donated millions to conservative Republican candidates and groups that are anti-LGBTQ and abortion rights.

Anschutz purchased The Weekly Standard from Murdoch in 2009 and closed it in 2019. Sources attribute its demise to an increasing divergence between its founder Bill Kristol and other editors' shift towards anti-Trump positions, and the magazine's audience's shift towards Trumpism. (Source.)